


Waterbugs

by W3LTERW8



Category: Megalo Box (Anime)
Genre: Coming Out, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Platonic Relationships, Sibling Love, Swimming, Trans Male Character, just in case any CREEPS come across this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-04-24 23:29:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22246420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/W3LTERW8/pseuds/W3LTERW8
Summary: When the heat of the summer rolls into the slum, Sachio's disinterest in joining Joe in his frequent swims brings to the surface certain things Sachio would prefer to keep secret.
Relationships: Joe | Junk Dog & Sachio (Megalo Box)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 45





	Waterbugs

**Author's Note:**

> boat, wandering around to various fandoms: here, have a fic with two trans people of disparate ages in a loving platonic/familial relationship coming out to one another!

With summer came Joe’s unflappable insistence on spending the majority of his day submerged in water, which did, admittedly, throw a wrench in the gym-building process.

It was a habit he’d had since his youth, still unkicked. When the boxer could be implored to put in some manual labor, thirty minute periods of effort got interspersed with the same scene, several times a day: Joe complaining about the heat, yanking off his shirt, and sprinting with arms akimbo down to the riverside. A splash, a sigh of relief, silence, and then the amusing sloshing of Joe reluctantly climbing back up to the building site in his sodden parachute pants. Nanbu called him a waterbug--sometimes fondly, sometimes with the same tone one might point out an earwig on the floor.

On weekends, when they and their ragtag construction team (Aragaki and Mr. Miyagi, Sachio’s buddies, Abuhachi the mechanic, when he could be bothered, passers-by in search of an autograph) took a couple days off to rest their muscles and callused hands, Nanbu let Joe herd them all into the truck and make the short drive to the seaside just beyond the city limits. There Sachio and Nanbu would sit and talk, half-attentive to the joyous splashing and laughter of the fighter in their charge battling the waves like a retriever.

Or a dolphin. Or a sparrow in a birdbath. They came up with plenty of analogies.

Nanbu could be persuaded, once or twice per trip, to walk out ankle-deep into the water. He’d chuckle at the feeling of it, of Joe’s hand around his wrist--one part assistance, a billion parts childish excitement at having drawn his coach to join him in the sea. Nanbu once told Sachio that Joe was trembling with excitement the first time they’d broken from practice, pre-Megalonia, to spend an afternoon by the water. They’d even hit some busted-up beachfront bar when it got too dark to swim, and, with the sound of his beloved waves lapping down the way as encouragement, Joe ceded to a drink. Just one. A beer, as light as they came, Mexican import. Joe never drank, but something about the saltwater got him loose enough to try, apparently.

“Brat complained through the whole bottle, of course,” Nanbu snorted. “Shivered every time he took a swig.”

Joe loved swimming nearly as much as he loved boxing, which came as a close second to his bike (and, Sachio hoped, he and Nanbu). Nanbu liked it okay.

Sachio didn’t budge.

“Come jump in with me, Sachio,” Joe would muffle through his tee-shirt as he wrestled it over his head, sweaty and speckled with paint.

“I’m good,” Sachio always muttered back.

They would repeat this at least a few times a day. Joe was a quick learner in many regards, but this wasn’t one of them.

Sometimes Sachio even woke up to the sound of Joe plunging into the river off the overpass, or from the deck of the tugboat, while they still had it. The sun had barely risen.

Neither Sachio nor Nanbu bothered to ask  _ why _ the young man liked the water so much. They couldn’t fathom it was any different from the way he loved his bike: something to immerse his whole hyperactive body in, sensation and stimulation and activity.

He’d emerge from the riverbed with treasures for Sachio sometimes--or was this an effort to be ecologically conscious?--glass bottles, knives, busted tech, even a bike wheel. Maybe he was trying to entice his little brother into joining him with materialism as his approach.

It didn’t work.

In early October, Nanbu sold the houseboat. Enough progress had been made on the Nowhere Gym that the trio could begin to move their meager possessions up to the sparse second-floor apartment--there weren’t any beds or chairs yet, but the plumbing was working, and they had a stove. Their final week on the boat was spent scrubbing away barnacles and grime, laughing around the kitchen table, burning old stowed papers in the firepit on the deck. It was bittersweet. The last of the warm days had come, and with their departure, so too would the boat be tugged to a scrap shop a ways up the river.

Joe swam as much as he could. He’d reappear at dinnertime with hair curled and fragrant with river water, fingertips puckered, a towel around his shoulders, goosebumps up and down his arms.

“It’s getting too cold for that, Joe,” Nanbu chided him. “You’ll get sick.”

“I’m fine, Pops.” Accompanied by a telling sniffle.

The forecast predicted one last heatwave their last night on the boat. Joe was in and out of the water throughout the blazing Indian summer day, into the humid evening. Sachio watched his head disappear, reappear, disappear again, so on. Silently, Joe placed trinkets on the deck where Sachio sat: a watch chain, a flash drive, a marble with blue glass and orange speckles.

“It’s no big deal if you can’t swim, Sachio,” Joe said, trying to sound offhanded while he drifted around. “I can teach you. It’s easy.”

“I told you already, I  _ can _ swim,” Sachio grumbled. “I just don’t.”

“Are you scared? There’s no sharks in here, promise. I’d be long gone if there were.”

“No,” Sachio said, rolling his eyes.

“Do you have a really gnarly scar on your stomach, or something?” Joe propelled himself up to grab the edge of the deck, dangle for a while with his chin resting on his arms. “Scars are cool. I’ve got lots of ‘em.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.”

When they met eyes, Sachio saw mischief in Joe’s, and Joe saw something unspoken in Sachio’s. With a grunt, the boxer pulled himself out of the water, sat cross-legged beside the boy.

“You can talk to me, Sachio.” For once, Joe sounded helpless. The quiet kind of helplessness that comes without fear. “I know it’s not nothing. I can tell.”

He wasn’t often so assured in his ability to discern… well, anything.

“I don’t want to,” Sachio whispered.

“Don’t want to swim or don’t want to tell?”

“Both.”

Idly, Joe rubbed a thumb over the painted metal that made up the deck. “Oh.”

Sachio wagered he knew what the fighter was thinking. Joe had never been one to pry; he himself tended not to let on what was running through his head most of the time. Hell, maybe even  _ he _ didn’t know. But they’d been more and more talkative with each other since Megalonia, staying up telling stories ‘till Nanbu hushed them--and Joe adored Sachio; he was transparent about that, at least. He made for a doting brother who seemed to admire Sachio just as much as he wanted Sachio to admire him.

Which Sachio did, obviously. With all his heart.

“I just… don’t…” Sachio swallowed, and his spit felt thick and sickly.

Was he really about to do this? He was, wasn’t he?

He took a deep breath. “Joe, you gotta promise me I’m your brother no matter what. ‘Cause family doesn’t get to pick family, and we both know that--and Pops, too, a-and--and if I don’t have you guys anymore ‘cause of this I’ll run away and never come back.”

Joe blinked.

“Like… when I learned Pops was conning us way back at Megalonia, I was pretty mad. And it mixed up a lot of what I thought of him. But I still loved him, and he was still my family, and even though stuff never went back to the way it was, it got better, because we were--we were growing together, like families do. Right?”

“Sachio,” Joe eventually said, “you could pay me a million bucks to stop calling you my little bro and I wouldn’t do it. Couldn’t. You could tell me you hated me and never wanted to see me again and I’d be like, ‘well, that’s Joe’s little brother for ya.’ You get me?”

Sachio welled up. He wished he had his hat with him so he could hide his face.

Deep breath.  _ Here we go. _

“I don’t have the body I’m supposed to. It’s like somebody got mixed up n’ gave me the wrong one.” Desperate, Sachio pulled his shirt up over the top of his head to hide himself. “And if people saw me, they’d get confused, or say I was lying, or...”

“What makes you say that?” Joe’s voice was low. “It’s  _ your _ damn body, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but… it doesn’t look right. It doesn’t look like--” He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t. “Doesn’t look like a brother’s is supposed to look like. It’s got the wrong parts.”

“What, are you telling me you’ve got tail feathers hiding under your shorts? Little dog ears in your hair somewhere?” Joe reached over, yanked Sachio’s shirt back down, and ruffled his mop of brown hair into a dusty mess, much to the boy’s chagrin. “You’ve got two arms and two legs, same as me. Heck, you don’t even need those. Aragaki’d beat me upside the head if I told him his prosthetics were the ‘wrong parts.’”

“You know what I mean, Joe,” Sachio snapped, wrestling the boxer’s hand from his head. “I’ve got--I’m--I-I’ve got stuff that  _ girls  _ have got, okay?”

“Nuh-uh. No way. I don’t believe it.” Joe crossed his arms, pouted. “Can’t be girl stuff if it’s  _ your _ stuff, kid. Now you’re just being stupid.”

“ _ You’re  _ being stupid!” Sachio roared, standing. “If you want to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,  _ fine! _ Better we never talk about it again anyway!”

Joe wasn’t plussed, but he pricked an eye open, skeptical. “Who says I’m pretending I don’t know? I don’t know shit nine times out of ten, Sachio; when I actually  _ can _ make sense of something, I’m buckling down, dammit.”

Sachio’s arms hung limp at his sides, hopeless.

“You see all kinds of folks hanging around the slums as a kid, Sachio; you know that as well as I do. There’s no girl stuff or boy stuff. Just Sachio stuff, Joe stuff, Pops stuff, Yuri stuff, Miss Shirato stuff, Ara--”

“I get it,” Sachio spat, exasperated. “You still gonna say that when I’m grown up, then? When my chest gets all big and my voice doesn’t get deep like yours?”

“‘Course I am. Just because you’ll be a grown up doesn’t mean you won’t still be my little brother.”

Sachio didn’t know how to respond to that.

“Look,” Joe said, sighing. “I’m not trying to shrug you off or anything, kid. I’m not good at talking about this stuff seriously, ‘cause, like--I’ve been there; I promise I have. And I kinda just like to let it sit there instead of being all… y’know. Noisy about it.”

Sachio blinked. Questions turned his brain into a buzzing wasp’s nest. “What do you mean?”

“I had to pick a name for myself ‘cause I’d never had one before,” Joe explained. “And I like Joe just fine; but the name itself isn’t what I like about it. It’s that, when people talk about me, they won’t say, ‘hey, that guy over there’s a great boxer’--I’m just Joe.  _ Joe’s _ a great boxer.”

“I didn’t… know,” Sachio uttered. “I--didn’t think you’d understand.”

“Sure I do. Better than anybody, probably. I’ve gotta run around half-naked punching guys half the time.”

Sachio let himself laugh, just a little.

“And when I was just a kid starting out, I didn’t like that much--but then I told myself, hey, this isn’t just some guy’s body. It’s mine. It’s got my scars, and the muscles I worked to build, and my hair the way I like it. It’s Joe stuff, through and through.”

Sachio’s head was swimming. He leaned over to let it rest on Joe’s shoulder, felt the fighter’s hand raise up to rest against the back of his head.

“Can I still call you my big brother?” he murmured.

“Of course.”

For a little while, they were quiet. Registering this new, unexpected kinship.

“You know, I moved around a lot when I was a kid like you. Ran with a lot of different groups,” Joe eventually said. “For a couple days, I slept on the couch these guys had outside their shed--one of ‘em had two huge scars on his chest, and when I asked what they were from--’cause back then I didn’t have any manners--he told me he got sick of his tits and had a back-alley doctor hack ‘em right off.”

Sachio fell to giggles. Hearing the ever-mild-mannered Joe say something so crass was just too much, but still--“You can do that?” he managed.

“Well, why not? Yuri got a bunch of robot parts put in him, then got ‘em taken out again. Aragaki lost both his legs, and Pops took his own two eyes out with butter knives. Sure, I’d prefer we got you someplace clean, at least--and I bet Pops’ll insist on vetting the guy to make sure he knows what he’s doing--but if you decide you don’t like ‘em when you’ve got ‘em, we can help you out, no problem. Pops is making me save most of my winnings for emergencies and medical stuff, anyways.”

Sachio clung to Joe’s arm like it was a lifeline. He felt shaky with relief and love.

“So… what’s all this got to do with not wanting to swim with me?”

Sitting upright again and slightly taken aback, Sachio said, “Everything. I don’t want people seeing me without a shirt. Not ‘till I’ve got two big scars to show off, at least.”

“Well, I can think of a pretty simple solution to that.” As if it were nothing, Joe scooped Sachio up from beneath his arms and held him aloft above the river.

“Joe, you fucking crazy person! Don’t! I’m gonna kick your ass!”

“If you were lying about being able to swim earlier, don’t worry; I’m coming in after you.”

“You are the  _ worst _ big brother on the face of the--”

In Sachio went to the blessed cool of the river. How had he managed to go all summer without this?

His head had barely surfaced when a splash sounded nearby and Joe erupted forth, laughing and shaking his head dry like a dog.

“C’mere, you jerk,” Sachio growled, leaping onto Joe’s back and shoving his head under. Joe struggled out from Sachio’s hold, then picked the boy up and threw him as far as he could. Sachio just swam back and seated himself atop the boxer’s shoulders again, fingers yanking his ears to make him spin and sway in the water while Joe laughed, laughed, laughed himself to tears. Joe tipped himself backwards; Sachio’s back hit the water with a  _ slap _ . As they wrestled, neither noticed Nanbu sticking his head out the kitchen window.

“Hey,” he called, stern, “if either of you drowns the other, I hope you realize that’ll double your share of work finishing the gym.”

“If you were feeling left out, Pops, you could’ve just said so,” Joe snapped back good-naturedly, hardly buckling as Sachio clambered up onto his head.

“Yeah, sure. Get your soggy butts in here; dinner’s almost ready.”

Joe yanked himself back onto the deck and hoisted Sachio up behind him with both arms, the pair of them still laughing between winded breaths.

“You’re a pest,” Sachio told Joe.

“Thanks,” Joe replied, tossing the boy his tee-shirt to make use of as a towel.

They went quiet for a moment as they dried off, Joe ruffling his towel over his mess of hair to fluff it back up.

“Sachio?”

“Yeah?”

“You know you don’t have to change anything about yourself, either. You’ll be Sachio no matter what kind of stuff you’ve got. Or--y’know, what you don’t.”

Sachio’s grip on Joe’s red shirt tightened. Eyes fixed down on the deck, he nodded.

“And for what it’s worth, if I’d ever had the chance to pick, I wouldn’t want my little brother to be any different.”

Sachio hid his face in Joe’s tee-shirt. “Shut up,” he mumbled.

Joe laughed, clapped a hand on Sachio’s back, and led him back into the houseboat where Nanbu was waiting for them.

**Author's Note:**

> blah blah blah it's corny and completely on-brand and i have no excuse


End file.
